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A trove of over 150 drawings by Andy Warhol—now on view at the New York Academy of Art—trace nearly four decades of work by the hand of the artist who wanted to be a machine.

This week—in conjunction with ANDY WARHOL: BY HAND—join curator and Warhol associate Vincent Fremont, curator Donna De Salvo, and poet, artist, and Warhol actor John Giorno for a panel discussion on the exhibition, moderated by curator and New York Academy of Art president DavidKratz.

AMAZING GRACE—Aretha Franklin ’s landmark gospel album—was recorded live at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles in January 1972. Franklin’s producer Jerry Wexler was there, as was film director Sydney Pollack, who was hired to document the performance.

The film—a revelation—has gone unseen until recently for two reasons: the sound and images were never in sync, and Franklin herself did not want the footage released to the public. Following her death, and a review of her original Warner Bros. film contract, AMAZING GRACE premiered in November 2018 in New York. It will screen in Los Angeles as part of the inaugural RedBullMusicCenterChannel film festival.

As part of the Los AngelesFilmforum series 1968: Visions of Possibilities, MOCA will screen the Los Angeles 4K restoration premiere of Jean-Luc Godard’s ONE PLUS ONE—part documentary of how the Rolling Stones developed their song “Sympathy for the Devil” at Olympic Studios in London, part 1968 political agitprop by Godard in the wake of the May uprisings.

“Godard had the crew lay down tracking rails that ran in a figure-eight throughout the studio… In ten-minute takes, Godard followed the song’s metamorphosis from a straight-ahead rocker to a pantheistic samba. Drummer Charlie Watts put down his drumsticks in favor of Algerian hand drums, and the four backup singers (including Marianne Faithfull) congregated around a microphone for gospel exhortations.

“The last night of the shoot ended prematurely as the studio caught fire when a gel filter on an overhead light ignited.” — Richard Brody*

Alternating with the studio footage are scenes Godard shot with Anne Wiazemsky playing “Eve Democracy,” who, followed by a documentary crew, responds to elaborate political questions—many of them lifted from a 1968 interview Norman Mailer did with Playboy—with “yes” or “no” answers. “In bringing Wiazemsky to London and casting her as the absurd and naïve Eve Democracy, Godard mocked not only democracy but Wiazemsky’s non-revolutionary commitment to it.”*

“PERFORMANCE is a mirror: You look in it, and it shows you a kind of self you fear or dream of….It’s part of the chronic English addiction to noir. It’s a fairy story, poised between the godheads of Aleister Crowley and Jorge Luis Borges. It has moments that belong to the history of the musical. It has passages worthy of an anthology of the most pretentious films ever made. It takes itself so seriously that it can be very funny….

“James Fox and Mick Jagger…are both good enough to hold the film in place, though the most powerful figure onscreen is Anita Pallenberg as Pherber, the seductive impressario….

“PERFORMANCE has to be seen—it is very visual. But it is very heady, too—and that requires patience….By now there is enough written about it to nearly bury the film. So hold on to moments, like Jagger singing ‘Memo from Turner.’ ” — David Thomson

This Friday, the American Cinematheque is screening a 35mm print of PERFORMANCE (1970, directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, with a score by Jack Nitzsche) on the second half of a “Rated X” double-bill with Lindsay Anderson’s landmark of rebellion and anarchy IF…. (1968, starring Malcolm McDowell, in his debut).

“PARISLA is born of shared perspectives. It’s a project, like a love story, that comes from the feeling of being in one place, thinking about another. A place between two cities, between scenes, between people, that exists only in the space of our imagination. In Paris, dreaming of the Pacific. Speaking French in LA. And it’s as true as a clear blue sky above us.”—Dorothée Perret, founding editor (Paris, November 9, 2008)